Hearticulture

So today at 8:30am, I had an MRI. It wasn’t as bad as last time, but it sure seemed louder somehow. The machine was much more recent–sporting a fancy LCD embedded into its doughnut badness–yet in the advancements it contained, apparently none of the engineers considered integrating sound dampening to avoid permanently deafening patents enclosed entirely within its grasping confines after repeated exposure to proximal squeals resembling a drunken hobo occasionally plucking the same frayed string on a “sweet” electric guitar he found jacked into a defective amp incapable of any setting below 100 decibels. And that was with the questionable headphones which conveyed sound through some archaic, almost steam-punk technology literally involving tubes muffling some insignificant fraction of the inescapable din. I was done at 11:30am. Hey! Only 3 hours! I’ll be invariably pestering them daily for a disk containing these gruesome movies so I can inflict the misshapen horror thrumming in my chest upon my friends and family.

My trip on the EL to work afterwards felt almost anticlimactic.

Once I arrived at work, I was immediately assaulted by a barrage of information that our managed hosting provider–in a continuing and almost entertaining serial ineptitude–comically mishandled a failing router that obliterated the fiber channel link to our SAN LUN, resulting in a ten hour downage of our main ETL and internal application database server. One may wonder why a managed data center lacked such accouterments as spare routers, but in these trying times of economic turmoil, I’m sure unused hardware was simply sold for scrap and their techs were greatly surprised upon walking into a supply closet furnished only by Fred boning his secretary on the bare concrete floor.

And not that it’s related, but I’m tired of my heart feeling weird. I have trouble falling asleep, because each unstable beat is like a sucker punch to my confidence. Sure I’m afraid I won’t wake up, but mostly it’s just uncomfortable no matter which sleeping position I attempt. Ever since that episode the day before my 31st birthday, my heart has resembled arrhythmia central.

I can’t even glance vaguely in the direction of caffeine or alcohol anymore without having unstable rhythm, and I get winded regularly performing mundane tasks like carrying in the groceries. I went from two to three hours of DDR once or twice a week to occasionally being soundly defeated by a long flight of stairs. This is as confusing as it is infuriating, and I’m basically powerless and ultimately impotent at addressing the situation directly. I’m reduced to waiting, and may need to accept living like a heart patent–something I’ve mysteriously avoided since I was “fixed” in 1984. If so, well… it was fun while it lasted.

Until Tomorrow